All You Need To Know About Regs
September sees the release of the “70” plate vehicles in the UK. Ahead of the new registration release, here’s a whistle stop tour of everything you need to know about how registrations work in the UK.
About registrations
Registrations were created to help ensure that the authorities could easily recognise vehicles, and they’re still used in this way today. Since they were first launched in 1903, each UK number plate has had a region identifier included in the alphanumeric characters it’s made up of.
The region where the car was first registered, as well as the DVLA office for the specific area, are displayed on all number plates in the UK in use today.
While the first letter of the regional identifier gives you the broader area where a car was first registered, the second letter allows you to detail with more accuracy and pinpoint a more precise location.
How do number plates work?
Number plates are designed to let officials and motorists identify a vehicle clearly and quickly when they need to. If you know how to read a plate, you can tell a car’s age and where it was first registered. Issued by the DVLA, the current format for UK plates consists of two letters followed by two numbers and then a sequence of three letters.
Ever wondered what the letters on a number plate mean?
The first 2 letters on a current UK plate identify where a vehicle was first registered, including the region plus the issuing DVLA office. But these aren’t the only letters on a plate.
The last three letters are issued sequentially and are designed to differentiate the vehicle from others registered in the same year in the same place.
What do the numbers on a number plate mean?
The first 2 numbers on a current UK number plate are there to identify the age. Plates are issued twice every year, from March 1st to August 31st and from September 1st to February 28th.
Plates released in the first 6 months take their numbers directly from the year, for example for 2019 they’ll be 1 and 9. Plates in the second release take the year and add 50, so for 2019 they’ll show a 6 and a 9.